What Happens When a Brown Chef Cooks White Food?

There’s a path for chefs in America: Cook at high-end restaurants, prove your chops, and open a place that reflects your experience. But for non-white chefs, the expectations are different. Even if you’ve been trained in classic French cooking, your restaurant has to be a reflection of how you look.

Eleven months: That’s how long Sohla and Ham El-Waylly’s Brooklyn restaurant, Hail Mary, lasted. The couple never expected to have to close the doors to their upscale-diner concept in less than a year, but the reality is that running a restaurant is hard, and running a restaurant as a chef of color is even harder.

Ham, who is half-Bolivian and half-Egyptian, and Sohla, a Bengali-American who grew up in California, both went to culinary school. They trained in the French technique. They worked long hours in a number of notable kitchens around the country (Sohla worked at Del Posto and Atera, while Ham cooked at Corton). This is the path of a chef in America; these are the things you have to do if you ever want to open a place of your own. But things are different when you’re not a white chef.

People frequently walked into the restaurant looking for foreign or exotic ingredients because of the couple’s cultural backgrounds.The El-Wayllys went so far as to pacify the most stubborn of customers with small fibs. “Sometimes, depending on the clientele, we just lie and say that there is cumin in our burger because that is what makes them happy, that is what they are looking for,” Sohla said. “They’ll taste the burger after being told that and be like, ‘Yeah! I knew that’s what it was,” even though there was nothing actually in there but salt and pepper,” added Ham.

Despite cooking way more challenging food in the past, the El-Wayllys found the biggest obstacle was trying to cook American staples like burgers and grilled cheese. They constantly faced having to meet people’s expectations for “cultural” twists on the menu. Unfortunately, the media and customers expect a certain amount of “ethnic-ness” from chefs of color—no matter what kind of food they are cooking. But it’s very much a Goldilocks problem. If the food is too white or too brown, it will not sell. It has to be just the right level of “ethnic.”

“Sometimes, depending on the clientele, we just lie and say that there is cumin in our burger because that is what makes them happy.”

Chefs of color in the U.S.—whether they are Asian, Middle Eastern, Latino, or African—struggle to out-cook the assumptions that come with the color of their skin. There are a handful of exceptions. Edward Lee, a Korean-American, made a name for himself cooking Southern food. Marcus Samuelsson, an Ethiopian-born Swedish chef, rose to prominence cooking high-end Scandinavian food. And Mexico native César Ramirez presides over the three-Michelin-starred tasting-menu restaurant Brooklyn Fare. But most face an uphill battle when trying to cook food that isn’t associated with how they look. This is especially the case when chefs of color attempt to find success making “white food,” particularly cuisines that are Eurocentric (like French) or stereotypically American.

White chefs are, of course, allowed to cook white food. But they are also allowed to cook non-white food, too. They are trusted as masters of the cuisines that are not part of their cultural heritages. Chicago’s Rick Bayless was free to fall in love with Mexican cooking, and went on to open nine popular Mexican restaurants throughout the city. New York City’s Ed Schoenfeld has become an established expert in Chinese cooking, while the chef Joe Ng at his restaurant RedFarm remains in the background. And Andy Ricker, who started visiting Southeast Asia as a backpacker, has built a Thai empire across the U.S. and is often called upon as an expert by the food media. This is a phenomenon called “cultural colonialism,” according to Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at NYU. “[White chefs] can be inspired by [a country], having gone there once or twice, maybe three times, learn its repertoire, and bring it back and be inspired.”

But most chefs of color, like the El-Wayllys, learn that this doesn’t go both ways. “Chefs of color do not have bodies that look like people with confidence and power who can go and, within a few weeks, nail down all that culture and then bring it back to here,” Ray said. Instead, chefs of color must prove that they can cook the food of their cultures before they can successfully open restaurants outside of that.

Dale Talde, a Filipino chef who rose to national prominence after a stint on Top Chef and currently runs three restaurants, has made a name for himself cooking rule-bending, no-fucks-given Asian food. But the pull toward Asian food only happened once he embarked on his career. It was never the food he dreamt of making. In fact, the chef never cooked Asian food until he started working in professional kitchens. Talde got his start at the Culinary Institute of America, which has a rigorous French-cuisine curriculum, in Hyde Park, New York.

“It’s crazy to me because the first things I learned how to cook were straight-up French,” Talde said. “But people never assume that French technique is what I do. Their assumptions are 100 percent on the color of my skin.”

“I wanted to be an inspiration to my community, but I also didn’t want to become that black chef that opened up that black restaurant.”

Talde firmly believes that he would not have had the career he has today if he had not opened Asian restaurants first. “I would not be this successful had I opened Massoni [his new Italian concept] at the beginning,” he said. “I had to prove myself and establish a strong point of view first before I could open non-Asian restaurants.”

But he still faced a frustrating slant in coverage when he opened Massoni. All the stories about the restaurant didn’t focus on the fact that he was making Italian staples like spaghetti and meatballs, but instead focused on dishes that featured the use of Asian ingredients, like the arancini made with biryani (a baked-rice dish popular in South Asia) and gnocchi made with gochujang, a fermented Korean hot sauce.

It’s not just customers with defined expectations for chefs of color, but the food media as well. “Unfortunately, there are only certain kinds of chefs that the media deems worth covering,” Ray added. “They can’t have an accent, or if they do, it must be a European one.” Among American food critics, the most highly regarded, or haute, cuisines are French, Italian, and New American, he added. Other ethnic cuisines, with the exception of Japanese, are seen as cheap eats—inferior, less sophisticated traditions.

When opening his first restaurant, Edouardo Jordan, an African-American chef and the owner of Salare, a James Beard–nominated restaurant in Seattle, shied away from debuting with a Southern eatery for that very reason. “From a chef’s standpoint, Southern cuisine or really any so-called ‘ethnic’ cuisine is always on the lower tier of the hierarchy, and would I actually get respect cooking something that is always seen as a lower cuisine? ...I wanted to be an inspiration to my community, but I also didn’t want to become that black chef that opened up that black restaurant.” This was about proving his cooking chops. “I wanted to show my culinary feathers and flex my muscles. I wanted to prove that I can cook with the best of the best at any time if I wanted to.” So he opened Salare, a reflection not of how he looks but of his career, including his stints at restaurants like Per Se and time spent cooking in Italy.

And even after he found critical success, Jordan says that people had a hard time believing that he is the owner of his restaurant. “A lady walked into Salare and looked directly at me one time and asked, ‘Who is the chef here?’” he said. “My face is plastered everywhere in this damn restaurant, so I definitely felt insulted. She wanted to know which one of my white cooks was the chef. If they don’t read the press, people tend to assume that this is a white-owned restaurant.”

“There are white chefs that can pull from different cultures without explanation, but us making white food always needs a thesis behind it.”

It’s a tough reality to face when there’s a number of restaurants that are run by white chefs who are celebrated for cooking beyond so-called “white” food. These are restaurants like the ambitious and well-funded Olmsted, which recently opened in Brooklyn to much acclaim. There, the talented chef Greg Baxtrom turns out everything from a pea falafel (Middle Eastern) to a gobi pakora cauliflower (Indian) to a fennel chawanmushi (Japanese). Instead of getting questions about why there are so many cultural influences on his menu, he is receiving accolade after accolade. Both Eater and The New York Times named Olmsted one of the best new restaurants in N.Y.C. last year.

The El-Wayllys opened Hail Mary with no investors, which meant they had “thinner margins than most” other restaurants opening, says Sohla. The couple believes that they would have been open longer had they gotten an investment. They also firmly believe the restaurant might still be up and running had they opened a concept that people expected them to open. “There would have been more leeway allowed in the food shrouded by illusion of ‘authenticity’,” she adds. She finds that idea infuriating. “There are white chefs that can pull from different cultures without explanation, but us making white food always needs a thesis behind it.”

Jordan, who grew up in Florida cooking soul food with his mother and grandma, is less upset by white chefs cooking the foods of other cultures. But he is incensed by the prices they are able to command for the same dishes. “I think it is harder to accept a white chef coming in and doing a cuisine such as Southern food, which is typically always a poorer cuisine, but they get to charge more for it,” he said. “Same goes for Chinese food. A white chef now doing Chinese food gets to charge $18 for the $7 item.” Perhaps one of the best examples of this phenomenon is chef Alex Stupak’s mini–Mexican restaurant empire Empellón, located in New York City. At his downtown taqueria, Stupak can command $7 per fish taco—a dish that goes for about two or three bucks at many of Los Angeles’s most popular Mexican restaurants that happen to be run by Mexican chefs.

This raises a number of questions for Jordan: “What are they doing that is so much better than us that they can charge that? How are they so much better?” But there is one in particular that he can’t quite wrap his head around: “Is it the color of their skin?”

As for the El-Wayllys, they haven’t given up hope of owning a restaurant again one day. Just this time around, they won’t be slinging high-end versions of grilled cheese and Pop-Tarts. Their next concept?

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